Websites contain valuable information for research and for documenting the history of the field of folklore studies. But they are ephemeral; they may change rapidly or even disappear. Anyone who cites information disseminated in websites as either primary or secondary data, for example, soon discovers that "link rot" is a significant problem.

Web archives capture snapshots of websites as they appeared at a particular moment. Researchers can use the resulting archives as a searchable index of websites both past and present, including websites that have changed. Web archives also provide a persistent citation to a site that existed at a specific time (thus avoiding link rot), and they allow access to websites that are temporarily down or permanently departed.

The Open Folklore Web Archive is a searchable collection of archived copies of websites that are of research value or institutional importance to folklorists. Collecting began in 2010 and is continuing, using the Archive-It service from the Internet Archive. The archive consists of two collections (https://archive-it.org/collections/2077 and https://archive-it.org/collections/2843) that together contain over 100 websites selected for their research value or institutional importance to the field.

So far, the collection has two areas of emphasis, both directed toward the goal of capturing and making accessible the institutional history of the field:

1. Websites of academic folklore programs

2. Websites of public, folk, and vernacular arts organizations, both government-sponsored and private not-for-profit. We based our initial selection on Gregory Hansen’s “Webography of Public Folklore Resources,” Folklore and the Internet: Vernacular Expression in a Digital World, ed. Trevor J. Blank (Utah State University Press, 2009):213-230.

In the last 6 months, the Open Folklore team has archived the following 48 new sites for the collection, raising the total collection to 115 sites:

To recommend other sites for this collection, please contact Open Folklore team member Moira Marsh at molsmith@indiana.edu.

Founded in 2010, Open Folklore (www.openfolklore.org), an award-winning partnership of the American Folklore Society and the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries, is a scholarly communications effort to make a greater number and variety of useful resources available to folklorists and the communities with which folklorists partner. Open Folklore offers a single point of access to a growing universe of folklore studies scholarship and public education in books, journals, websites, and gray literature, and to information about open-access communications in folklore studies and beyond.

To learn more, attend the Open Folklore session at next month’s AFS annual meeting in Santa Fe (Exploring Open Access Folklore Scholarship I: How Open Folklore Can Help You To Be a Smarter (!) Folklorist, Session 01-03, Thursday, November 6, 8:00-10:00 am).

Is No News, Good News? At Open Folklore, the Answer is Yes!

Posted onSat, 03/01/2014 - 2:01pm

The news page at the Open Folklore portal has been quiet. Is that a bad sign for the project and for open access in folklore studies? No, it is good news and here is the backstory.

Since the update of the Open Folklore portal site, the OF team has been focused on the project's longer term efforts. This noisy behind-the-scenes work has meant that we have been more quiet in public. But what is going on back stage? The OF team works to be open about the project, of course, so here are some updates.

Generous and talented colleagues Miriam Posner (UCLA, @miriamkp), Nancy Sims (U Minnesota, @CopyrightLibn), and Ethan Watrall (Michigan State U, @captain_primate) visited Bloomington for meetings with the Open Folklore team during July 2013. On the basis of their studies of the project, they authored the report "Open Folklore: Maintaining Momentum, Assuring a Future." It too is now accessible in the IUScholarWorks Repository. Find it here:

Because of travel problems, a fourth project consultant--Perry Willett (California Digital Library, @cpwillett)--was unable to reach Bloomington for the assessment meetings in June. He generously undertook an independent review of the project and its portal site. His report is also now available in the IUScholarWorks Repository. Find it here.

Since accepting these thoughtful and helpful reports, the project team has been working to implement and build upon the recommendations made by the consultants. Team efforts in pursuit of these project enhancements--both organizational and technical--accounts in part for our quietness.

In sync with these efforts, Open Folklore co-project principal investigators Julie Bobay and Timothy Lloyd have been participating in a series of gatherings and workshops on "sustainable scholarship" organized by Ithaka S&R--a research organization serving libraries, scholarly societies, academic publishers, and others interested in scholarly communication.

Plans for the future of Open Folklore are being developed in the context of two additional efforts. One of these is the National Folklore Archives Initiative. This connected and parallel project includes AFS and many partner organizations in the field. Building upon the work of its initial NEH funded phase, the NFAI is--like Open Folklore--planning its next steps. In early February, OF and NFAI project participants met together in Bloomington to coordinate joint work in partnership with the IU Libraries, which hosted the meetings.

In addition to NFAI, Open Folklore is in close dialogue with the Office of Scholarly Publishing at Indiana University. The OSP is a new campus unit that brings together the IU Press and the open access scholarly communications work of the IU Libraries. It thus holds much relevance for both Open Folklore and the field of folklore studies. Like OF and NAFAI, the Office of Scholarly Publishing, and the IU Press within it, are making ambitious plans for the future.

On top of all of this, Indiana University Bloomington is pursuing a number of key plans of relevance to Open Folklore. In addition to a new campus strategic plan, Indiana University has announced an ambitious program of digitization for all of its time-based media holdings as well as a new planning effort for the digitization of other campus holding.. As these include the full holdings of the Archives of Traditional Music and other collections of relevance to folklorists and local communities around the world, this is a big deal with immediate relevance to OF.

The takeaway is hopefully clear. A quiet news page is a consequence of a lot of work going on behind the scenes. If we stay quiet for a while longer, that is only because we are tackling some big and worthy items on the OF to do list.

New Version of the OF Portal Launches

Posted onSat, 10/12/2013 - 5:13pm

The following story has appeared on the AFS website. It reports on the launch of the new OF site, which you are now visiting.

The Open Folklore partnership of the American Folklore Society (AFS) and the Indiana University Bloomington Library (IUBL) has just unveiled a major update to the look and operation of its web site openfolklore.org. The new design simplifies the visual appearance of the site, and a number of underlying changes improve the site's search functions as well as its presentation of background information about scholarly communications in the field of folklore studies. Our thanks go to the AFS members and IUBL staff members who provided comments as part of this process or who took part in the beta-test of the new site.

Since 2010, Open Folklore has operated as a) a website; b) a scholarly portal providing access to open-access books, journals, websites, and gray literature in our field; c) a branding effort or unifying label for a collection of projects and efforts being pursued by AFS and IUBL to make a greater range of scholarly resources in folklore studies openly available for those who need them; and d) a case study for productive and effective collaboration between an scholarly society and an academic library.

Technology Lead Garett Montanez Interviewed About his Open Folklore Work

Digest: A Journal of Foodways and Culture Relaunches as Open Access Title

Posted onThu, 09/27/2012 - 2:02pm

Many back issues of Digest, the journal of the Foodways section of the American Folklore Society were already available via IUScholarWorks Repository and discoverable via Open Folklore search, but the Open Folklore team is particularly excited to relay news that the journal has been relaunched as an open access journal title under the leadership of co-editors Michael Lange and Diane Tye.
The editors note in their recent editorial: "The new Digest is the result of collaboration between the Department of Folklore at Memorial University of Newfoundland and the professional programs at Champlain College in Vermont. This innovative cooperative model divides the work between the two campuses, maximizing the resources and skills of both. The content editorial work will be handled at Memorial, drawing on the knowledge and experience of the folklore faculty members and graduate students. The layout, design, and publishing work will take place at Champlain, where the skills of professional majors such as Graphic Design, Web Design and Programming present the journal’s content in an attractive, functional, and professional form."

World Oral Literature Project, Open Book Publishers and UnGlue.It Release New, Open Edition of Oral Literature in Africa.

Posted onWed, 09/12/2012 - 2:00pm

The World Oral Literature Project, a "Friend of Open Folklore" organization, and the UnGlue.It project, in partnership with Open Book Publishers, has just released a new open access edition of Ruth H. Finnegan's book Oral Literature in Africa. This is the first book to be successfully "unglued" through a crowdfunding scheme with the aim of making the book permanently and freely available to all in an open access edition. The new publication is accompanied by an freely accessible online archive of supporting media presented and preserved by the World Oral Literature Project.
The book is available in PDF, EPUB and MOBI formats from both unglue.it and Open Book Publishers. Open Book Publishers is also selling a paperback and hardback edition. All versions are published under a CC-BY license.
It is particularly exciting that the world's first unglued book is a study of folklore and that so many non-folklorists and non-anthropologist joined in the work of making it freely available. Two hundred and fifty seven contributors came together to give this book to the world. The group includes distinguished people from many fields, including fiction, history, archaeology, law, librarianship and many others.

Congratulations to everyone involved in this exciting project.

Catching Up With Open Folklore: Project Report Spring 2012

Posted onTue, 06/12/2012 - 1:59pm

Since the time of the fall 2011 report to the community, Open Folklore has continued its work to extend the benefits of open access to the folklore studies community and to the diverse stakeholders with whom folklorists partner. Here are some highlights on the project's work over the past eight months.New Partners and New Harvested Content
Two new partners have joined the Open Folklore community as "Friends of Open Folklore." Scholarly content from these partners is now discoverable via the Open Folklore search tool.HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theoryis now part of the Open Folklore universe. HAU is a new gold open access journal published by a consortium committed to the development of theoretical perspectives that are grounded in sophisticated ethnographic fieldwork. HAU is a new journal that launched last fall.
Another new partner is the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America, the scholarly association that publishes the journal Tipití. Tipití is the only refereed journal dedicated to the study of the societies of lowland South America. The journal has been published in its current form since 2003 and is being made open access through the Digital Commons repository at Trinity University.Additional Content from the American Folklore Society
New AFS materials made available during the most recent reporting period include a collection of "Best Practice and Case Study Reports" deriving from a program of consultancies supported since 2009 with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, a collection of "Professional Development Publications," and a collection of society publications on the "History of U.S. Folklore Studies."
Extended runs of two more of the Society's section journals have also been made available in open access formats. These titles are Digest: An Interdisciplinary Study of Food and Foodwaysand the Public Programs Bulletin.
All of this AFS content has been deposited in the IUScholarWorks Repository and is thereby discoverable via Open Folklore Search. It can also be accessed via the IUScholarWorks Repository. Open Folklore Content in Archive-It
The Open Folklore team continues to work to preserve key folklore studies-related websites through the Open Folklore collection in Archive-It, the media rich archiving service offered by the Internet Archive. This work has resulted in preservation copies of the websites for:

The Center for Folklore Studies at the Ohio State University

City Lore

The Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures

The Folklore Program at the University of Oregon

The University of Wisconsin Folklore Program

The American Studies Program at Penn State Harrisburg

The Mid Atlantic Folk Arts Forum

The Museum Anthropology Review Weblog

The Alliance for California Traditional Arts

The Peter and Doris Kule Centre for Ukrainian and Canadian Folklore

The International Society for Folk Narrative Research

The Civil Rights History Project

Local Learning

Folklife in Louisiana

Keepers of Tradition

Memorial University of Newfoundland Department of Folklore

New York Folklore Society

Folklore and Mythology Electronic Texts

The University of Pennsylvania Graduate Program in Folklore and Folklife

Georgia State University Heritage Preservation Program

These archived websites are in addition to those websites archived and announced previously. In-kind support from the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries makes use of the Archive-It service possible.
The Open Folklore team thanks Sara Naslund and Jennie Crowley, both students in the Indiana University School of Library and Information Science, for this excellent work on the OF Archive-It Collection during 2012-2013.Outreach Activities
Since the last biannual report, the Open Folklore team has been busy speaking about the project in a range of venues.
Librarians from the Open Folklore team led two "Learning With Librarians" sessions at the AFS annual meetings in Bloomington. One was "An Introduction to Copyright, Intellectual Property, and Open Folklore" and the other was "An Introduction to Digital Humanities and Online Information Resources."
Last October, OF team member Moria Marsh presented "Open Folklore Project–Collection Development, But Not as Your Father Knew It" during the 2011 Archive-It Partners meeting in Louisville, KY.
At the 2011 meetings of the American Anthropological Association, OF team member Jason Baird Jackson presented "Another World is Possible: Open Folklore as Library-Scholarly Society Partnership" as part of the panel "Digital Anthropologies: Projects and Projections" and is now available on Jackson's website.
The Open Folklore project was one of a number of projects discussed at an April 2012 event hosted by the University of Minnesota Libraries, with co-sponsorship from the UMN Department of Anthropology. The event was titled Open Research and Learning: Collaboration, Connections and Communities and it focused on the social side of open access, open educational resources, and open research architectures and collaborations. In his remarks, OF team member Jason Baird Jackson discussed not only OF, but also the social nature of research-focused group blogs and the implications of new journal publishing strategies such as those central to the PressForward project and its associated Digital Humanities Now and Journal of Digital Humanitiesefforts.
In May 2012, Moira Marsh represented Open Folklore at a “Web Archiving Summit” held by invitation at Columbia University. This meeting included librarians and archivists from key institutions engaged in harvesting and archiving web content who discussed high-level programmatic issues of objectives, scope, policies,,and methods for this work. Keeping in Touch

The OF Project Team, Strategic Partner, and OF Friends share the goals of keeping the community informed about work on OF and receiving continuous input and feedback. We will continue to use the OF news tools (Facebook, Twitter (@openfolklore), and especially the OF News section of the portal site) to share news about OF goals and next steps about every six months. Feedback and comments are always welcome by email, weblog post, Facebook comment, and good old fashioned mail (℅ either the IUScholarWorks Project at the IUB Libraries or the AFS Office).

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory Joins Friends of Open Folklore; Now Searchable at OF Portal Site

Posted onThu, 05/10/2012 - 1:56pm

The Open Folklore Project is pleased to announce thatHAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theoryis now a Friend of Open Folklore and is discoverable using Open Folklore search.
Launched in the fall of 2011, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory is "an international peer-reviewed, open-access online journal which aims to situate ethnography as the prime heuristic of anthropology, and return it to the forefront of conceptual developments in the discipline." HAU is published by a consortium of parters known as the Network for Ethnographic Theory (HAU-N.E.T.). The current partners are the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS, France), the University of Sydney (Australia), the University of Manchester (UK), the University of Amsterdam (Netherlands), the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History, Institute of Social Anthropology, Oslo University, and the Department of Anthropology of the University of Canterbury (NZ).HAU's Editor-in-Chief is Giovanni da Col of the University of Cambridge.
Because HAU is published using Open Journal Systems, a publishing platform that works with the Open Archives Initiative-Protocols for Metadata Harvesting, it is a relatively simple technical matter to set up a harvesting routine than results in all new content published by HAU (and other Friends of Open Folklore) becoming searchable via the Open Folklore search tool.

HAU is an exciting new publishing effort in the ethnographic disciplines, one that Open Folklore is happy to be partnering with. Like OF, the HAU team is eager to develop new approaches for increasing the reach and impact of ethnographic scholarship. Congratulations to the HAU team on their successful journal launch last fall and, more recently, on the establishment of a companion Masterclass Series.

Open Folklore Discussed as Part of UMN Forum on Open Research and Learning

Posted onThu, 05/10/2012 - 1:54pm

The Open Folklore project was one of a number of projects discussed at a recent event hosted by the University of Minnesota Libraries, with co-sponsorship from the UMN Department of Anthropology. The event was titled Open Research and Learning: Collaboration, Connections and Communities and it focused on the social side of open access, open educational resources, and open research architectures and collaborations.
In his remarks, OF team member Jason Baird Jackson discussed not only OF, but also the social nature of research-focused group blogs and the implications of new journal publishing strategies such as those central to the PressForward project and its associated Digital Humanities Now and Journal of Digital Humanities efforts.
Amazing presentations were offered by Doug Armato (Director of the University of Minnesota Press, focusing on the transformation of university presses in the context of shifts to open access approaches to scholarly communication), David Ernst (Director of Academic and Information Technology for the UMN College of Education and Human Development, describing the UMN's new open textbook project) and Lucy Fortson (Associate Professor, UMN School of Physics and Astronomy, discussing remarkably successful open data-based citizen science collaborations, particularly the Galaxy Zoo project and related Zooniverse projects). UMN Copyright Librarian Nancy Sims moderated the panel.
For those who are interested in a recap of the event, Barbara Fister has offered one in a new essay published at Inside Higher Education. She starts from the substance of the panel and proceeds to offer reflections on the nature of undergraduate learning and research in a changing information environment. Find her essay in Inside Higher Education.

General Lessons from the Open Folklore Project are the Focus of Recent Paper by Jason Jackson

Posted onFri, 02/10/2012 - 12:53pm

The Open Folklore Project's Outreach Lead Jason Baird Jackson has recently circulated a version of the paper that he delivered at the 2011 American Anthropological Association meetings in Montreal. The essay "Another World is Possible: Open Folklore as Library-Scholarly Society Partnership" was initially presented as part of the panel "Digital Anthropologies: Projects and Projections" and is now available on Jackson's website. In it, he argues for pursuing the opportunities that exist for scholarly societies and libraries to partner directly together to reshape the scholarly communication system in more sustainable and democratic ways. The paper characterizes the Open Folklore project as an example of such work that is already underway.